Here's the new rig. You'll recognize the Roland VR09 on top, and the new Korg Kross 2 88 is large and in charge on the bottom tier.

Friday night after work (and after picking up one of the cars from the shop), I went over to Coffey Music and picked up a Korg Kross 2 88. (Yes, I've been holding back on you. You'll just have to get over it). Goodness, gracious, there's a lot going on in there!

As you can see, it's taken its rightful spot on the stand. I'm trying now to decide just what I'm going to do with the Casio. The sad thing is that it still plays just fine through its internal speakers, but the jack panel on the back is pretty much shot and it's almost impossible to get it properly repaired. So, my quandary is whether or not to sell it, or buy the stand for it and set it up permanently at home ... Mmmm ....

Moving right along ...

I was definitely right in my last post about the angle of the keyboard throwing off the action. In playing position, it's much lighter, making it quite comfortable to play. So, my next task is choosing the "replacement" sounds to cover the Casio and assigning them as "favorites". After that, it's on the the really fun stuff dealing with loading in audio samples, and working with the arpeggiators to get that Baba O'Riley sound I've wanted to cover for years (okay, so I started making notes on that last night) -- I've finally got the instrument to do it with!

I did some fun testing last night, and found that my iPad recognized the Kross 2 instantly when I connected the two using Apple's "Camera Connection Kit", which is basically a fancy name for a Lightning to USB A adapter. I was multitracking in Garage Band in about thirty seconds. That, my friends, is how stuff needs to work. Fie on this silliness of loading drivers and hoping they fly.

I will need to load the drivers on onto a Windows laptop, though, so that I can use the editor/librarian software to get things configured and backed up a little more conveniently. Editing the arpeggios on the LCD screen on the keyboard won't be all that much fun, and it will be good to be able to prep samples before uploading, although the limited editing offered in the keyboard is actually quite serviceable as far as it goes. And, because the keyboard doesn't support sample ADSR looping, it goes as far as it really needs to. I'm hoping, though, that Korg can add full sample editing capability in the future, as Roland did on the Juno DS.

So far, only one disappointment, and one complaint. The disappointment is that the vocoder seems to only work in a limited number of pre-configured ways. I was hoping that I'd be able to select any sound as the carrier input, but that doesn't seem to be the case (or, maybe I just haven't figured that out yet). The complaint is with the editor software -- it's a fixed size, so on my "big" laptop, it uses only a small portion of the screen.

[UPDATE: It appears that I can use the vocoder effect on any sound, not just those that Korg have already set up. The result can be stored as a favorite for quick recall.]

And yes, I know. That's a lot of tabs open in Chrome. Forty-one to be exact. Who in their right mind needs forty-one browser tabs open?!?!? But, you get the picture. The editor is the black-and-grey app opened over Chrome. The section on the lower right, just above the keyboard, is one of the arpeggio editors. Those little, tiny squares within that are the places for the actual "notes" that make up the arpeggio. No matter. I'll figure something out.